It’s been a tender week in our home. A quiet sort of grief has crept in, unexpected and bittersweet. Last week, I said goodbye to someone I hadn’t seen in years - my grandad, or “Pops,” as we called him growing up.
We weren’t close in the end. Life and family can get complicated, and the years quietly slipped by without visits or phone calls. But despite the distance, the news of his passing left a strange sort of hollow - a gentle ache filled with old memories I hadn’t thought of in a very long time.
When I was little, Pops was my first gardening teacher. He had one of those beautiful backyards with herbs tumbling from terracotta pots, cherry tomatoes strung like jewels on the vine, and always, always rhubarb, tucked away in the corner. He was a funny old man, even when he wasn’t that old. A little grumpy, deeply English, often in a knitted jumper and slippers, but with a softness reserved just for us grandchildren. He always made time. We’d potter together in the sunshine, his weathered hands showing me how to plant seedlings and brush the soil gently from new potatoes. We harvested, we laughed, and when the day’s work was done, we’d sit in the shade house he built, and eat rhubarb and custard, sweet and tart and perfect.
Tonight, Ollie and I shared that same dessert. He didn’t know the story behind it, but I did. And as I stirred the custard and spooned it over the rosy stalks, I felt my Pops beside me, in the memory of sun-warmed afternoons and dirt under fingernails.
Grief is strange when the connection has been distant. There’s no funeral for our bond, no formal farewell. Just quiet remembering. And maybe that’s enough. Sometimes we don’t get to say goodbye with words - but we can with memories, with the scent of herbs in the air, with custard in a chipped bowl, with a child’s laughter in the garden.
I owe a lot to Pops. He gave me the gift of the garden. Without him, perhaps I would have never planted anything. Never dug into the earth with hope. Never created the home and life I have now, nestled among flowers and food and family.
So this is my goodbye.
Thank you, Pops. For the cherry tomatoes. For the rhubarb. For the joy of planting something and watching it grow.
Rest easy, dear one.
Love,
Kelsey x